Wednesday, January 29, 2014

In 1981, Centuri had undergone one
of the most remarkable transformations in coin-op history, going from perennial
also-ran to major player in a single year. As 1982 dawned, they seemed ready to
enter the upper echelons of the industry, but only time would tell if they
would be able to do so.

1982
Games (Part 1)

Round-Up

Licensed from Hiraoka[1] (probably the same company
that created Phoenix), Round-Up was released in December of
1981. The game was a combination maze/puzzle game with emphasis on “puzzle”. The
player controlled a character called “Cowboy” who, despite his name, was more
of a ghostly-white version of Pac-Man with eyes, legs, and a pink hat. The
action took place in a concentric maze at the center of which was a grid of 9
(later 16) white circles. The goal was replace all the white circles with red ones.
To do this, “cowboy” had to “round up” red “knights” then “push” a new red
circle into a row or column of the grid. Opposing Cowboy were five “gly boys”:
Ugly, Beastly, Ghastly, Homely, and Deadly. Aiding his efforts was King Rompus,
whom the player could touch to temporarily freeze all enemies and knights. The
game also featured a bonus round in which the player had complete one side of a
Rubik’s Cube (which they called an “electronics cube”) so that it matched a
target pattern. While the game was certainly innovative, it wasn’t much of a
hit and Centuri probably sold around 700-1,200 copies. The game was later
released by Taito as Fitter.

D-Day

One of Centuri’s
sorriest releases was April’s D-Day,
licensed from Italy’s Olympia, a company that had been founded by Livio Leante.
While Olympia was headquartered in Milan, their games were developed and
manufactured at their factory in Bari (supposedly home to the second university
in Italy to offer a degree in information science). Olympia produced its first
game, Master’s Game (a Breakout-like game) in 1979, possibly
under the Leante Games brand. From 1979 to 1983, the company produced at least
a dozen and a half titles, many of them knockoffs of existing hits. ­D-Day was their most successful game
and the only one to be released in the U.S. Looking at the game’s crude
graphics, it’s hard to see why. The game was a shooter in which the player used
a single cannon to defend a beachhead from enemies including tanks, ships,
planes, and trucks. It was a perhaps Centuri’s biggest flop of the decade and
probably less than 100 units were sold.

Loco-Motion/Guttang
Gottong

A bit more successful, but not much, was Loco-Motion (known as Guttang Gottong in Japan), licensed from Japan’s Konami (formerly known for their very profitable relationship with Stern). . The game was
based on the ubiquitous 15-piece sliding block puzzle invented by Noyce Chapman
in 1880
in which the player slid blocks horizontally or vertically within a frame to
complete a picture or rearrange the blocks in numerical sequence. In Loco-Motion, the video “frame”
contained 15 blocks, each with a section of a railroad track on it. As a train
chugged around the track, the player had to slide the blocks to create a path
for it and prevent it from crashing. The player also had to guide the train to
pick up trackside passengers. If a passenger wasn’t picked up within a
reasonable amount of time, they were replaced by a countdown timer and if the
player didn’t reach the timer before the time reached zero, A “Crazy Train” appeared
that the player had to avoid. While the game was not a hit, it was one of the
earliest examples of an arcade puzzle game.

Centuri sold only $576,000 worth of Loco-Motion games in 1982, probably translating to about 300-500
units. In the long run, however, the game may have Centuri’s most important
release of the year since Centuri’s relationship with Konami would prove
perhaps even more lucrative than Stern’s had been.

The Pit

1982
was an international year for Centuri. Loco-Motion
had been licensed from a Japanese company, D-Day from an Italian one, and April’s The Pit came from jolly old England. The game was developed by the British
company AW Electronics (aka Andy Walker Electronics, for its founder). In his
youth, Andy Walker had served as a shipboard radio operator before spending ten
years in the British Foreign Office. In 1977, while working at a government
electronics center, he had his first brush with computers when he encountered a
Honeywell 316 mini-computer. Instantly captivated, he purchased a kit computer
consisting of single board with an 8080 microprocessor, a small amount of RAM,
and a set of 8 red LEDs for output (as with the Altair and other early
computers, it didn’t support a monitor). The only documentation consisted of a
single photocopied page of instructions and a copy the 8080 instruction set.
Programs had to be entered a byte at a time via 8 toggle switches. If the user
made a mistake, they had to start over again from the beginning. In addition, the
computer had no way to permanently store data, so even if a user did enter the
data correctly, the program only lasted until they turned the computer off.
This led to an amusing (at least in hindsight) incident. Walker entered program
after program, only to find that they didn’t work. After spending days trying
to sort things out, he finally discovered that to enter a 1 the user had to
flip the toggle switch up and to enter a 0 he had to switch it down. This was
obvious to American users but not to Walker, since in the U.K. (and most other
countries), switches worked exactly the opposite way (to turn a light on, for
instance, you pushed the switch down rather than up). Nonetheless, Walker
eventually tamed the electronic beast and taught himself how to program in hex
code. In 1981, fascinated by the new microcomputers that were appearing on the
scene, Walker asked his bosses to send him to a small systems course to learn
more about the machines. Convinced that the future was in mainframes and
minicomputers rather than micros, they refused. Not long afterwards, Walker’s
job changed and rather than relocate he quit and formed a company called Andy
Walker Electronics (AWE - aka Slogan Court Ltd.) in the seaside town of
Birdlington.

Deciding to build a computer of his own, Walker acquired a Tangerine
Microtan 65 computer (a 6502-based kit computer). After putting it together, he
ordered another and began writing programs in assembly language, displaying
simple, interactive shapes on a black-and-white monitor. Realizing the system
had potential, he hired another programmer named Tony “Gibbo” Gibson from
Barnstable in Devon. Meanwhile, he purchased three graphics board (one each for
red, green, and blue) and set about designing new hardware that expanded the MicroTan’s
meager RAM, sound and graphics capabilities. After persuading a local company
to turn his design into actual circuit boards, Walker programmed a crude Defender clone called Andromeda on his new system. Realizing
that it was a bit too crude, he trashed the game and started again,
eventually bringing in Gibson. Working together in a spare room in their house,
Walker and Gibson would write code in assembly language then print it out and pin
it to the wall so they could remember the memory addresses the next day. When
they added joystick control to the game, they realized they could make a
coin-op game. Young and full of confidence, they decided they could create
their own from scratch and Walker began designing a cabinet. He ended up
creating a multi-game system that allowed operators to swap ROM boards on the
fly without turning the machine off (Walker described it as a “video jukebox”).
Around this time, a third member joined the team - a graphic designer named
Andy Rixon. Before long, the trio had created two additional games for the
system: Hunter and The Pit. Oddly enough, it was a bug in Andromeda that led directly to the creation
of The Pit.

[Andy
Walker] The spaceship had a fin on the back and it didn’t always rub itself
out. It would paint the screen in pixels but then when it went through a second
time it would tunnel through them. Ah, there’s a game there.

<”The
Making of The Pit”, Retro Gamer #85>

With
three games completed, Walker and Gibson packed their system into a rented
Nissan van and headed to the Cunard Hotel in Hammersmith for the London
Previews (a prominent British trade show). They set up a small both next to a
major manufacturer (where the near constant music from a Frogger machine nearly drove them mad) and got their system
up-and-running, which required loading the operating system from cassette tape
- a process that took fifteen minutes or more. Then, five minutes before the
show started, an electrician told everyone they were going to turn off the
power for a few minutes. Panic set in as Walker and Gibson had to hurriedly
reboot their system and wait several painstaking minutes as the first visitors
wandered into their booth only to be greeted by a screen with a “loading…”
message.

In
the end, however, things worked out just fine. They made the acquaintance of
Norman Parker, who headed Zilec Electronics in Burton-on-Trent, one of the
U.K.’s leading arcade game manufacturers. Parker took a look at their system
and was duly impressed. After the show, Walker paid a visit to the Zilec
factory and Parker suggested he show his system to Centuri sales exec Joel
Hochberg, who was Zilec’s agent (it appears that he had also set up his own
company called Coin-It by this time). Hochberg was interested in their system
and had them ship it to him in Florida (Zilec actually handled the shipping). During
testing in Miami, The Pit proved to
be the most popular of the system’s three games and Hochberg quickly licensed
it to Centuri, netting AW Electronics a royalty of $136 per machine at a time
when the going rate was around $40. Hochberg took a large part of the royalty
for himself, but Walker didn’t mind since Hochberg had given him the foot in the
door he needed to establish himself in arcade industry. While Hochberg liked
the game, the multi-game system proved impractical

[Andy
Walker] Our (treasured) rack-mounted Tangerine custom hardware worked fine but
was really unsuitable for mass-production and Joel suggested that we completely
abandon it in favour of Centuri (capable, successful) boards - and he was
right. The software guys at Centuri knew their board inside-out and got The Pit rewritten in fantastic time. It
was quickly agreed that it should be released as a single game - and that was
shown to be right decision too.

Meanwhile,
Zilec/Zenitone produced a version of The
Pit for English arcades based on the Galaxian
board and assigned the task of porting the game to a pair of new Zilec engineers – brothers Chris and Tim
Stamper (who went on to form their own company called Ashby Computers &
Graphics, designed the game Blue Print for
Bally/Midway, and later founded the software company Rare).

The Pit was
a digging game – a kind of crude predecessor to Dig Dug, Mr. Do, and Boulder
Dash (whose creator, Peter Liepa, named The Pit as a major influence). The player guided a "space
prospector" through an underground landscape strewn with boulders in an
effort to collect a series of seven gems while avoiding enemy astronauts and
falling rocks. Three of the gems were located in a large rectangular
"pit" at the bottom of the screen whose ceiling was lined with
falling enemies. Other obstacles included a pool of green acid(?) with a
disappearing floor above it. While the player collected gems, the
"zonker" (a name had chosen for the American version) slowly chipped
its way through a mountain protecting the mother ship. If the player made their
way back to the mother ship before the zonker "zonked" it, they
received a bonus depending on how many gems they collected. As with most games,
there were a few features that didn’t make it into the final version. The game
was originally to feature additional levels, culminating with a fight against
the "Grand Dragon". Despite the fact that the Grand Dragon never made
it into the game, it may have influenced a much more popular digging game.

[Andy
Walker]…when we were at the preview show, we all knew it was a work in
progress. We described it as such to some Japanese people who were extremely
interested. I think they were from Namco or Atari. We described how you would
find the Dragon and blow it up. Not ‘you kill it’ but specifically ‘you blow it
up’. The Japanese gave us an old-fashioned look then made expanding gestures,
then “boom”. The point being that when we said “blow it up” they thought
“inflate.”

<”The
Making of The Pit”, Retro Gamer #85>

The
idea of a dragon that you “blew up” later turned up in Namco/Atari's Dig Dug. Walker claims that when he
mentioned the uncanny similarity to Atari, they informed him that THEY were
suing HIM for stealing their (or rather Namco’s) idea. Luckily, at Joel
Hochberg's suggestion, AW had registered a U.S. copyright on their game in
November of 1982, two months before Atari and Namco copyrighted Dig Dug and nothing came of the threat.
While The Pit wasn’t a major hit for
Centuri, they did sell $2.9 million worth, probably about 1,200-2,000 units[2].

The Pit ended
up being AW Electronics sole arcade video game. They did develop a few games
that never made it to production, including Stamper (a game in which the player tried to deliver items by foot,
plane, or car while avoiding being stomped flat by wandering beasts) and Hunky DoorKey (a maze game in which the
player collected keys to open doors). Meanwhile, with their royalties from The Pit, Andy Walker and Tony Gibson
purchased some Intertec Superbrain computers and began working on another game
called Pipeline. Eventually they
formed a company called Tasket and released Pipelinefor the Commodore 64, along with a
number of other innovative titles such as Super
Pipeline (probably their most popular game), Seaside Special (which involved throwing seaweed at leading U.K.
politicians)and Bozo’s Night Out (in which the player guided a character named Bozo
on a pub crawl, trying to get as drunk as possible before returning home
safely)

[1] While the game’s flyer says it was
licensed from Hiraoka & Co, the attract screen says it was copyrighted by
Centuri and Amenip.

[2] According to Centuri’s annual report,
their biggest production run of the year was 2,000 units. If there was only one
game per run and The Pit only had one
run, that would mean The Pit sold
2,000 units. If there was more than one game per run (the report said that
Centuri never had more than two games in production at one time) then the figure
would be lower.

BONUS PICTUREThis has nothing to do with Centuri but I was recently discussing Taito America's games and thought I'd post the following. It's a marquee for the ultrarare Taito America game Black Widow that was sent to me by the game's designer, Mark Blazczyk. Some report that the game was unreleased, but Mark recalls that a few copies made it out the door.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

There are number of well-known legends
associated with various arcade video games of the 1980s. Perhaps the two games
with the most are Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. With the latter there are legends
about the origin of the game’s name, the main character’s name, the involvement
of Ikegami Tsushinki, the game’s Popeye origins etc. With the former there's the
pizza legend (discussed earlier), the release date, the question of when and if the
enemies were referred to as ghosts and so on. One story about Pac-Man that has oft been repeated is that
when it debuted at the 1980 AMOA show in October, the industry pundits liked
Namco’s other game Rally-X better.
In fact, the story goes, Rally-X was
the hit of the show. Here’s a typical version from Steven Kent’s Ultimate History of Video Games:

“Buyer and analyst response at the October AMOA show
further confirmed that Rally-X was
the best game in the group. Of all the video games at that show Rally-X received the most favorable
comments.”

Note that the “group” mentioned here refers to the four
games introduced by Namco: Pac-Man/Puck-Man,
Rally X, Tank Battalion, and King
& Balloon. There are actually two (or three) separate claims here: 1) that Midway
liked Rally-X best of the four Namco
games and 2) that Rally-X was the
hit of the 1980 AMOA. Both stories are often used to illustrate either the myopia
of industry executives or the revolutionary nature of Pac-Man (a third claim is that the industry in general preferred Rally-X to Pac-Man)

Let’s look at claim 2) first. This one should be pretty
easy to check. I have the relevant issues of RePlay and Play Meter,
the two premier industry journals of the time, so if we want to know what the
industry thought, those are the key sources of information.

First, however, a word about the 1980 AMOA show, and the
show in general. For those who don’t know, the AMOA (Amusement and Music
Operators of America) expo was the premier industry show in the U.S. in the
1980s (and probably from the 1960s to at least the 1990s). The 1980 show was a
pretty interesting one in terms of coin-op history. Other than Pac-Man and Rally-X, games making their debut at the show included Battle Zone, Berzerk, Defender, Crazy
Climber, Spectar, Star Castle, Space Panic, and Moon Cresta.

So, which games were considered the hits?Play Meter covered the show in its 1/15/81 issue, which actually had three separate articles, reviewing the show. First was an article by Dick Pearson titled "Play Meter plays the games"Unfortunately, Pearson didn't name a standout game, noting "But since Space Invaders, we have seen something new added to the games, which makes it all the more difficult to pick a 'Game of the Show." He then goes on to further discuss how difficult picking standout games is and doesn't name a game of the show.Nonetheless, he does discuss the following games as among the standouts: Battlezone, Berzerk, Star Castle, Defender, Spectar, and Space Tactics, and also mentions Radar Scope, Zero Hours, Uni War S, Space Panic, and Crazy Climber.Here's his take on Pac-Man and Rally-X

Hmm. He doesn't seem to favor one over the other. Plus he also mentioned a lot of games, so this article may not be of much help.Later in the same issue we have Dick Welu's show diary. Welu is much more forthcoming with what games he liked and disliked.He calls Star Castle a "honey", was lukewarm on Space Panic, and liked Battlezone. His pick for game of the show?

OTOH, he did pick a Bally/Midway game as "sleeper" of the show. Which one?

Yep, he picked Space Zap (!!???) as sleeper of the show. Now don't get me wrong, I loved me some Space Zap back in the day, but sleeper? Really?Finally, we have the article "An Independent Review: Standout games at Chicago Show" by Tony Licata. Ahh. This is just what we're looking for. He actually picks four standout games of the show. And they are....Battlezone...Bererk...Star Castle....and... wait for it...Deep Death....Deep Death?...DEEP DEATH!!??!!?!That's what he picked. Pacific Novelty's Deep Death (which was subsequently renamed Shark Attack).OK, so it looks like Play Meter didn't consider Rally-X the standout game of the show, or even significantly better than Pac-Man.What about RePlay?

Here's a review of the show from the 12/80 issue

:

No Rally-X there, but he does mention Pac-Man and (once again) good old Space Zap.

Here's another review from the same issue.

﻿

I don't know about you, but I'm not seeing any evidence that Rally-X was considered the hit of the show or that it was more well regarded than Pac-Man. OTOH, neither was Pac-Man considered the hit of the show, so the perhaps the larger point still stands.What about the other claim, that Midway initially liked Rally-X more than Pac-Man? That claim actually does hold water. Midway president Dave Marofske said as much to Kent. When I talked to him circa 1999, he told me pretty much the same thing:

[Dave Marofske] When we went to Japan
there were four games, I believe, that were shown. Atari, ourself, and many
others had looked at the games and talked to Namco about licensing them. The
one that Mr. Nakamura and company felt had tremendous potential was Rally X, which was a maze driving game.
They also had Pac-Man, which they
called Puck Man. They also had a
tank game, which I think was called Red
Tank or maybe just Tank and they
had a game that they called Red Balloons
or something similar. They said they
were not going to licensing all four to any one company and, in fact, they were
leaning towards releasing them to four different companies. Rally X seemed to be the one that kept
getting touted but we sort of thought there were two strong games and the other
one was Pac-Man. I don’t think
anyone on our side, and obviously nobody on their side at that time knew which
was going to be the stronger game but we felt they both had strong potential.

Far more interesting was a story that Game Plan exec Ken Anderson told me. First, a little background. In the end, Namco chose to license the four games to two different companies. Midway got Rally-X and Pac-Man, while Game Plan got Tank Battalion and King & Balloon. Ken Anderson was an executive at Game Plan at the time and over the years it seems he worked for half the manufacturers in the industry. How did Midway end up with Pac-Man? Here's what Anderson told me

[Ken Anderson] You want to hear a real
story. Dave Marofske was the president of Midway in 1980. Namco had four games
and they were going to give Game Plan two and Bally/Midway two. [It came down
to] Tank Battalion and Pac-Man. We flipped a coin. I won and I
turned down Pac-Man because I
thought Tank Battalion was the
better game.So I turned down Pac-Man for Tank Battalion.

Now I don't know if that's true or not and I haven't confirmed it but if it is, it has to be one of the all-time great whiffs (though, of course, it's easy to say that in hindsight).

Oh, and did you notice the raves about Space Tactics in the above articles? What's the deal with that one? For those who don't know, it was a huge cockpit game from Sega that used an elaborate system of gears, motors and pulleys to rotate - not the cabinet, or the player's seat, but the monitor (which was actually mounted in the bottom of the cabinet and reflected via a mirror, so they may have rotated the mirror). It also had LED lights to display various player stats as well as a steering wheel with a thumb button, plus six other buttons. One person called it the most over-engineered video game in history.

Finally, here's some more pictures form the 1980 AMOA show.

Hmm. Is that Namco founder Masaya Nakamura playing Rally-X? I thought so at first, but can't tell for sure. It looks like the game starts with a "T" but it doesn't look like a Tank Battalion cab.

Bonus. Another famous myth.

Earlier, I mentioned Donkey Kong myths. One of the most famous is that it was originally called Monkey Kong and the name was only changed to Donkey Kong due to a translation error (in some versions, due to either a blurred fax or a misheard phone call depending on who's telling the story).

That story is considered "busted". There's even a longish article on it at Snopes.

Recently, however, I came across the following from the October 1, 1981 Play Meter

What? Monkey Kong? So is the "busted" myth not a myth after all? Have I found holy grail of video game mythbuster-busting? Alas, I think not. I'm pretty sure this is just a good old fashioned typo. RePlay referred to the game as Donkey Kong the month before this issue came out and may have done so earlier. But it did give me a brief rush of adrenaline.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Magic
Electronics of Cranston, Rhode Island is little remembered today but in 1984
and 1985, they released over two dozen video games, a few of which were
minor hits. Their most well-known games were probably The Glob, Super Glob, H.B.'s Olympics, 8 Ball Action, Driving Force,
Samurai (Nichon Ichi), and Special
Forces: Kung Fu Commando, all of which made the RePlay and/or Play Meter charts.
Most of these games have been forgotten today as had Magic Conversions. There are
a number of reasons: they made only conversion kits, they released their games at
the height of the industry crash, and their games were designed by or licensed
from other companies and are thus not associated with Magic.

Nonetheless,
Magic had a fairly interesting history. Tracing that history, however, can be
difficult since it is intertwined with the history of a number of other
companies and tangentially related to even more. In fact, I could have called
this article "the tangled history of Ferncrest Distributors/Omni Video
Games/Glak Associates/Eagle Conversions/Magic Conversions/Epos
Corporation/Cardinal Amusements/Montgomery Vending/Magic Electronics" but that doesn't really roll off the tongue.

The
main connections between Magic and its direct ancestors were two men: Frank
Gaglione and Kevin McIntyre, who served as President and VP of most of them.
Their history starts with another Rhode Island company called Omni Video Games.

Omni Video Games, Inc.

Of all the companies associated with Magic Electronics, Omni
Video Games is the most famous, largely because of their role in the Stern v. Kauffman case, one of the most
influential and important cases in video game history. Omni was headed, and
likely founded, by Frank Gaglione. Little is known about Gaglione’s early life.
It appears that he may have been born in 1913. On April 2, 2013, the Rhode
Island Senate passed a resolution honoring Frank Gaglione of Providence on his
100th birthday (http://webserver.rilin.state.ri.us/BillText13/SenateText13/S0805.pdf).

Given the name and the fact that Gaglione’s business were all in the Providence
area, it seems likely that this is the same person (a Frank Gaglione who died
in Buffalo in 1997 appears to be a different person). By 1980, Gaglione had
established a company called Ferncrest Distributors in Warwrick, RI to distribute
slot machines and video games for Universal and other coin-op companies. I am not sure exactly when Omni was founded but it appears to have been around 1980. According to the records of the Rhode Island Secretary of State, Omni Video Games, Inc. was incorporated on June 24, 1980 as Omni Gaming Systems, Inc. The incorporation record claims that the name was changed to Omni Video Games. Inc. in 1993, and lists Barbara Maggiacomo listed as president (whose address is listed as 123 Shadow Brook Lane in Warwick). It also claims that Omni filed the fictitious name of Elm Manufacturing on 3/12/84. I'm not sure this is the same company, but given the name and the Warwick association, it seems likely). Frank Gaglione's name doesn't appear on the summary of the incorporation record on the Sec. of State website, but it might appear in the actual articles (articles of incorporation generally include officers of the company)

Omni produced at least a dozen-and-a-half titles between
1980 and 1982. A number of them seem to have been legit. The licensed a number
of games, for instance from Artic Electronics/ATW USA, including Mars and Devil Fish (I believe that Artic Electronics is a different company
from the Artic International that was sued by Williams and Midway. I read that
they actually changed the name of their US branch to ATW to avoid confusion
with the other Artic). Other Omni games, however, were anything but legitimate.
Midway sued them over their bootleg versions of Pac-Man, Galaxian, and Rally-X.

Stern v. Kaufman

The 1981 case Stern v. Kaufman brought Omni its most
lasting fame. It was not, however, the first time they’d tangled with Stern in
court. In November, 1980 Stern had filed a complaint against the company over a
bootleg version of Astro Invader called
Zygon and succeeded in shutting
production on the game down. Omni was unfazed. In April, 1981, just four weeks
after Stern released Scramble (like Astro Invader, it was licensed from
Konami), Omni released their own version (called either Scramble or Scramble 2),
selling it for $650 less than Stern. Stern filed a complaint
almost immediately.

The “boring” stuff

First,
the stuff that many will find boring (though I actually think it’s interesting)
– the case itself.I don’t have time to
go into all the details here (that could take up an entire post) but the case
hinged on a few provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976 (incorporated into
Title 17 of the U.S. code), which protects "… original works
of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression ". The act then
goes on to list examples. The list does not include video games specifically,
but it does included literary works, and audiovisual works, and video games were
generally registered under one of these two categories. Rather than registering
the code as a “literary work” Stern had registered a video tape of the actual
gameplay as an audiovisual work. One reason might have been that registering
the code might not prevent someone from creating an exact copy of the game with
original code. Registering the gameplay, on the other hand, protected the game
even if someone duplicated it with new code. According to George Gerstman, Stern’s
lawyer in the case, there was another reason. Gerstman had earlier worked on a
case called Data Cash Systems v. JS&A group that involved a copy of an electronic
chess game. In that case, the judge had ruled that game code embedded on ROMs
was not copyrightable since the code wasn’t “readable”. As a result, the copyright
office stopped granting copyrights for programs on ROMS or PROMS (after the
trial, Gerstman was able to persuade them to change their policy and the Data
Cash decision was apparently later overruled).

The idea
of submitting a videotape of gameplay had come up in the Astro Invader case and Gerstman himself shot the video. To do so,
he had to lug his “portable” VCR to the Stern factory (which consisted of a
camera and a base VCR unit that he had to strap to his back). In addition,
neither TV monitors nor VCRs were common in courtrooms at the time (not even in
New York, where the Kaufman trial took place) and Gerstman had once again haul
his VCR to court.

In the
trial, Omni claimed that Konami//Stern’s Scramble
did not meet the copyright act’s originality requirement because what
happened in the game depended on the actions of the player. The video tape wasn’t
original either, because it depended on the ROMs and the underlying code, which
Stern had not registered. The judge disagreed and issued a temporary injunction
against Omni. On appeal, Omni tried attacking the “fixation” requirement of the
copyright act claiming that the game was not “fixed” because it was different
every time you played it. They also claimed that each act of playing the game
constituted an original work, while the video tape only showed one particular
instance. Omni lost again.

The not so boring stuff

Some
aspects of the case were a bit more exciting. One was that Frank Gaglione himself
was called to testify. Of course, that itself is not very interesting, but the
reason he was called is. As Gerstman explains in his book “Clear and Convincing
Evidence”:

“The president of Omni, Frank
Gaglione, was present at the hearing. Judge Nickerson had recently been the
judge in a federal criminal case concerning the New York mob. Without impugning
Frank’s character, let’s just say that he was wearing a dark red shirt, a dark
suit and a light tie. Frank was a tough looking guy. I wanted to be sure that
Judge Nickerson knew that Frank was Omni’s president. I called Frank to the
stand as an adverse witness. Frank had not expected this. Although I had not
taken his deposition earlier, I was confident that I would be able to get
useful testimony from him.”[George Gerstman (2013-04-02).
Clear and Convincing Evidence: My career in intellectual property law (Kindle
Locations 1913-1917). AuthorHouse. Kindle Edition.]

Also
interesting was that two weeks after Stern filed a complaint against Omni for
copyright infringement, Omni filed a complaint against Stern for trademark
infringement. “What gives?” you may well be asking. As it turns out, in December
of 1980, Gaglione ordered 10 marquees bearing the name “Scramble” from a
company called BCA posters (Konami had already showed Scramble in Japan, so the title was known in the video game
industry). Gaglione slapped five of the marquees on three other Omni bootlegs
that were already in production (Space
Guerrilla, Space Carrier, and Rally-X)
then filed for a trademark on the name “Scramble”. It was a rather shameless
attempt, but you have to admire the guys’ chutzpah. Thankfully, the court didn’t
buy it for a second.

A
final amusing (in retrospect) incident occurred after the trial. Despite the
judge’s order, Omni continued to produce their bootleg Scramble game, this time under the name Air Shuttle. In October, Stern found out about some copies of Air Shuttle that had been sold in
Tulsa, OK and got a court order allowing them to seize the games (they even got
the judge to fast track the process). Gerstman himself went to Tulsa and, aided
by a US Marshall, helped confiscate games from 14 different locations. They
later found more bootleg games in Brooklyn. This time, however, things didn’t
go so smoothly. Gerstman and another US Marshal went to a convenience store to
seize five games. After loading three of them on their truck, 8 men walked in with
Doberman pinscher’s on leashes, then locked the door behind them and threatened
to turn the snarling dogs loose if the games were not returned posthaste. Gerstman
and the Marshall (wisely) decided to comply. As the left, they were pelted by
rocks from kids lining the rooftop.

In
any event, the judge was none too pleased that Omni had continued producing
their games in violation of his order and brought criminal contempt charges
against Frank Gaglione (to expedite matters, the charges were later dropped). Not
long after the case, the Omni Video Games disappeared from the trade magazines
(though the company didn’t go away entirely. In 1986 they were assigned rights
to a video game scoring system developed by Wing Company, Ltd (which served as
the basis for a 1991 lawsuit). Frank Gaglione, meanwhile, went on to form
another company, this one in Providence, called Glak Associates - but that will have to wait for part 2.

Games Made by Omni

I don’t really have a
good list of games made/distributed by Omni, since I don’t really track bootleg
games, but here are some titles I’ve come across:

·Devil
Fish (licensed? from Artic Electronics)

·Mars
(licensed?
from Artic Electronics)

·Packman
(Pac-Man
bootleg)

·Piranha

·Pool
Hustler? (Omni registered a trademark on this name, but I don’t
know if they ever made a game)

·Rally-X
(bootleg)

·Red
UFO
(appears on flyer, may be same as Artic’s Defend the Terra Attack on the Red
UFO)

·Scramble/Scramble
2 (bootleg)

·Space
Carrier

·Stand-Off
(Omni
registered a trademark on this name, but I don’t know if they ever made a game)

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Since I haven’t posted in a while,
this one is going to be a long one. Sadly, it will not be a very in depth one
since I was unable to interview anyone for it.

During the mid-1980s, as the arcade video
game market began to decline, many operators began looking for new ways to make
money off of their fading old titles while not breaking the bank buying new
games. One solution that became increasingly popular was convertible games.
Convertible games came in two major variations: conversion kits (which allowed
the user to change one game to another by swapping out the hardware) and “system”
games (which included a standardized main board and games that could be swapped
out by replacing a tape, small daughter board etc.). Two of the earliest, and
best-known such systems were Gremlin’s Convert-A-Game and Data East’s DECO Cassette
System. One of the most prolific system game makers, however, was Century Electronics
and their CVS system. Unfortunately, the system has received little attention
in gaming histories and few remember it today.

Perhaps this post will go a (very
small) way towards correcting that. Unfortunately, I was unable to find much
info on the company or track down anyone who worked there. Nonetheless, I did
find some interesting (at least to me) info that I thought I’d share. First, I’ll
give an overview of the company’s history. Then I’ll take a more in-depth look
at their games.

Beginnings

In January of 1981, Century Electronics Ltd.
of Oldham England introduced its CVS Convertible Video System at a private showing
at the ATE in London. Century had been founded in 1979 (possibly by Peter
Robinson and David Jones) and development on the CVS system had started around
summer of 1980. The system consisted of a Signetics 2650-based mother board
(designed by Philips Electronics) and a 5.5” x 8” x 1“ “program module” that
could be swapped (along with a marquee) when the operator wanted to install a
new title. The system also included a separate sound board with speech
capability. While only two titles were available at the time of its debut (Dark Warrior and Cosmos), more were in the works and Century planned to release a
new title every six weeks. To create them, Century had a staff of 12 designers using
a $1.5 million development system made exclusively for them by Philips in the
Netherlands.

Coming to America – Tuni Electro Services

While the system was available
earlier in Europe, it wouldn’t make its way to America until 1982. Around
December of 1981, Tuni Electro Services of Tempe, AZ inked a deal with Century
for exclusive North American rights to the system. At the time, Tuni was all
but unknown in the U.S. coin-op industry, though they had a 12,000-square-foot
factory in Arizona capable of turning out 100 video games per day as well as a
13,000-square-foot factory in Vancouver, Washington. Century chose to deal with
the tyro manufacturer because (they said) they wanted to work with a young,
aggressive company that would be dedicated to pushing their games. And Tuni was
aggressive. They initially planned to spend $800,000 (upped to $1.6 million by
April) to launch the system in the U.S. and Canada and ordered 10,000 modules.
By this time, two more games were available (Space Fortress and Radar
Zone/Outline?), and Tuni planned to order 10,000 more modules after the
first half of the year. While Century supplied the game modules (which Tuni
panned to offer for $350 each, or $250 with a trade-in), Tuni would manufacture
the cabinets and circuit boards.

The first two titles for the system
were a pair of vertical shooters, Dark
Warrior and Cosmos. Other early
titles included Space Fortress (a
color version of Asteroids), Dazzler (a maze/climbing game in which
the player avoided pursuing vultures while feeding bananas to a gorilla), Video8-Ball (a video version of pool), and Radar Zone (a kind of combination of Amidar and Qix). It
seems that Tuni initially had high hopes for the system. In the summer of 1982,
it announced that it was expanding its R&D department with an eye toward
developing new CVS games in conjunction with Century. Engineering VP Tom Opfer was
appointed to head a staff of ten programmers and technicians and Tuni spent
$100,000 on development equipment with plans to spend even more. They also sent
Opfer to England to learn the ins and outs of the system.

Things apparently went downhill
quickly, however and by the end of the year the relationship between Century
and Tuni had soured (to put it mildly). According to Tuni marketing director
Patrick Reed[1], the
trouble started when Century complained that Tuni wasn’t selling enough of its
games (Play Meter reported that they
sold only 700 complete systems by January of 1983[2]).
Reed, on the other hand, said it was because Century didn’t furnish them with
the number of new titles they’d promised (they had delivered only 3 since the
system launched[3]).
Whether because of this or the lackluster quality of the games they did offer,
Tuni was already in trouble by the fall of 1982 and in September, Arizona’s
E.T. Marketing (another company headed by Reed) bought up Tuni’s assets, which
they felt included the rights to the CVS games. Century, on other hand,
disagreed, maintaining that they had terminated their contract with Tuni in
August and that the rights to the games now belonged to Century’s U.S. branch, (recently
established in Great Neck, NY) which had signed an exclusive contract with
Century on September 1. In addition, Century sued Tuni for copyright
infringement for selling the games Wall
Street and Logger, which they had
shown at the 1982 AMOA show. Century also launched separate suits to collect
outstanding debts from Tuni. Reed, on the other hand, claimed that Tuni had
never even signed their contract with Century, because of “problems with
language…that would have required Century to come up with a new game every six
to eight weeks that would be marketable in the United States[4]”
Instead, the two companies had made individual licensing agreements for each
game. In addition, said Reed, Century owed Tuni $240,000 for electronic parts. He
further claimed that he had scheduled a meeting with Century VP Peter Robinson
to discuss the issue, but he had never shown up (Robinson, in return, said he
wasn’t taking any calls from Reed).

Convertible Video Systems Takes Over

In the end, it appears that Century
eventually won out and by summer the games were being marketed exclusively by
their U.S., headed by industry vet Mickey Greenman (E.T., meanwhile, had
started marketing a line of video games for children called Moppet video ). Initially, the office sold
their kits directly to operators, bypassing distributors entirely but by early
1983 they had changed their policy. By this time, Century was selling its
revised base system (which included a new connector board among other
enhancements) for $1,095 to $1,295 (depending on whether the distributor
installed it) with additional games for $275 ($150 with trade-in). They were
also offering distributors exclusive rights to sell the game in their
territories. It seemed to work, at least at first, as the company landed three
games on the RePlay’s software
charts. The first was Video8-Ball, which reached #4 (in 1986, RePlay named it the #36 game of 1982). The
last was Heart Attack (aka A-Maze-ing), a maze game in which the
goal was fill the floor with dots rather than eat them. Despite its crude
graphics and lackluster gameplay, Heart
Attack game somehow managed to make a sole appearance on RePlay’s software chart in September,
1983. Century’s biggest (or at least
most well-remembered) hit was probably Hunchback,
which appeared on the RePlay software
chart five times and peaked at #2 in July, 1983 (it had reportedly reached #1
in Europe). The game was a multi-screen jumping game that cast the player in
the role of Quasimodo in an attempt to rescue the beautiful Esmeralda. Other CVS games included Raiders (another vertical shooter) and Gold Bug/Digger (a digging game).

The End of Century

None of these games, however, matched the
success of Hunchback (though Outline reportedly sold well) and
Century didn’t last much longer. In mid-January, 1984 they scheduled a
distributor showing where thy debuted three new products: a shooting gallery[5],
a quiz game, and a children’s video game series. While the games were
well-received, they were never produced (at least not by Century). The next
week, on January 18, Century declared bankruptcy (ironically, the previous month,
Tuni had been pulled out of bankruptcy and taken over by Enter-Tech).

CVS was not completely finished, however, at
least not yet. Century’s U.S. branch was not affected and soon began to work
with other companies to produce their games. Around May, Crown Vending of Corona,
New York announced that they would be producing new Game-Paks for the CVS system.
Headed by Steve Hochman, who had started his coin-op career as a soda machine
operator in Queens in 1965, Crown Vending was one of New York City’s largest
distributors. In mid-1983, noting the growing success of Hunchback, they had sold a kit called Playpak that allowed
operators to convert games with Galaxian/Scramble hardware to CVS base systems.
In 1984, they released a pair of new titles for the system. Both were
(apparently) developed by Century (though the first, at least, was manufactured
in California) and both proved to be solid hits (though mostly as conversion
kits for other games). First was the motorcycle racing game Superbike (April, 1984), which was
available as a CVS module as well as a conversion kit for Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong,
Jr. Despite gameplay that was derivative of title 2-years out-of-date, Superbike reached #1 in Play Meter’s conversion kit chart for
street locations in November of 1984. Almost as successful was Hero in the Castle of Doom (aka Hero), in which Quasimodo made a return
appearance (this time without the green tunic) in a maze game where he once
again had to rescue the fair “Ezzmerlda”. Released in November, 1984 Hero in the Castle of Doom debuted at
#1 on Play Meter’s conversion kits
chart for street locations in February 15, 1985.

In late
1984, another company began producing titles for the CVS system. First came H.B.’s Olympics (aka Hunchback Olympic and Herbie at the Olympics). Designed by
Century/Seatongrove, the game was built by Magic Electronics of Cranston, RI
and marketed by Montgomery Vending. The game, once again, featured our old
friend Quasimodo. Sporting his original green tunic from Hunchback, Quasimodo competed in seven different Olympic events. Priced
at $375, the game was also available as a conversion kit for Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Scramble. It reached #12 on Play Meter’s conversion kit chart for
street locations in December, 1984 and #14 on RePlay’s software chart in February, 1985. Montgomery/Magic also
had a minor hit in 1985 with another CVS release called Eight Ball Action, whichwas
also released as a conversion kit.

With Eight Ball Action, CVS and Century disappeared into the mists of arcade
history. Exactly how many games Century sold is uncertain. In May, 1984, Play Meter reported that they had sold
20,000 CVS systems overall and about 10,000 in the U.S. and they likely didn’t sell
many more systems after that point (though they continued to sell games). Despite
this, the company and its games (except maybe for Hunchback) have largely been forgotten by video game fans today and
have drawn scant mention in video game histories. There are number of possible
reasons for this. While the system did produce some minor successes, it never
had a hit on the order of magnitude of a Burgertime
or a Mr. Do! In addition, the
few hits it did have came during the nadir of arcade video games’ popularity.
The fact that the company was British may have been a factor as well (at least
in the U.S.). The biggest reason, however, was probably the lackluster quality
and derivative nature of the games themselves.Nonetheless, CVS remains one of many interesting footnotes that litter
the pages of coin-op history.

THE GAMES

Now let’s
take a brief look at the actual games, in rough order of when they were
released.

NOTE – For
various games on the list, I note the original game that they ripped off. I
suspect, however, that all of their games may have been rip-offs, so if anyone
knows of one I missed, let me know.

D

ark WarriorTuni/Century

Released: 10/81 (MAME), though it was likely
not available in the U.S. until around December. Play Meter mentioned the game
in their 9/15/81 issue. It may have been shown at the 1981 ATE show in January.

Rips Off:??? This one does look familiar, but
I can’t think of an actual game it copies.

A fairly straightforward
vertical shooter in which the player protects a line of fuel tanks from a
variety of invading alien ships. In addition, walking aliens (called “dogs” in
one issue of Play Meter) would appear
on the horizon and begin moving toward the player, launching an attack when
they got too close. If the MAME sounds are accurate for this one (and lord
hopes they’re not), this gets my vote for wussiest firing sound in the history
of video games (it sounds like an anemic chicken peeping).

CosmosTuni/Century

Released: at the same time as Dark Warrior

Rips Off: Astro
Blaster(Gremlin/Sega) – big time

This is one
of the top candidates for Century’s most blatant rip-off. They copied
everything from the laser temperature gauge to the fuel gauge to the speech to
the docking. All without much of the charm of the original (I’m not sure, for
instance, if they copied the bonuses – one of my favorite features of Astro Blaster).

Somehow,
this managed to be chosen as one of five games for the famed That’s Incredible tournament/Video Game
Olympics (the one won by Ben Gold).

Space FortressTuni/Century

Released: ???, I believe it was available by the
time Tuni started selling the system around December, 1981. It was shown at the
AOE show in March, 1982.

Rips Off: Asteroids

This one isn’t
nearly as blatant a rip-off as Cosmos.
While it had the same basic gameplay as Asteroids,
it also added a number of new features, including color, a fuel supply, a
damage meter, speech, sensors, and a stage where the player defended a space
fortress. The game also included a second stage that was sort of similar to Dark Warrior (complete with a firing
sound that is, if anything, even more annoying – at least in MAME)

Rips Off: Donkey
Kong (level 1) and ???, The MAME history filed describes this as “cross
between Pac-Man and Donkey Kong Jr.” but I don’t really see
it, other than that it was a maze game and had locks and a gorilla.

This one
combined a maze game and a climbing game. In the former, the player opened a series
of 13 locks, collected bananas, and fed them to a purple gorilla. The player
also had to avoid vultures (or distract them with snakes). The second level was
a version of the first level of Donkey
Kong with some amazingly crude graphics for an arcade game in 1982 (or even
for a computer game in 1979).

Video 8 BallTuni/Century/CVS

Released: 4/82 (RePlay catalog), shown at AOE in 3/82

Rips Off: ???, this one was similar to Konami/Dynamo’s
Video Hustler/Li’L Hustler but I don’t
think I’d call it a “rip-off” since most video pool games were necessarily
similar

Charts: RePlay software chart,
#4, (1983)

Not much to
say here. A video version of pool. It made the charts a long time after its
debut, so CVS may have produced another version.

Radar Zone/Outline (??)Tuni/Century/CVS

Released: Uncertain. This one
was listed on the original Tuni flyer and Play
Meter says it was available at the time the system was released in the U.S.
but the July, 1982 issue of RePlay
said that it would be available shortly as the sixth CVS title.

Rips Off: Amidar

I’m not
positive this is the same game as Outline,
but I think it is. Trade magazines refer to both games and never intimate that
they are the same. The first mention I found for Outline was in February, 1983. After the New York office took over,
they said it was one of their two biggest sellers (along with Video 8 Ball) so they may have renamed
it.

The game
itself was kind of a more boring version of Amidar without the gorillas and the jump button (i.e. the fun
stuff). The enemies looked kind of like the sparx from Qix. The player’s main defense was a button that created a temporary
gap in the maze outline. Later levels included enemies that fired at the
character and “asteroids” levels (with colored asteroids in the background).

LoggerTuni?/Century

Released: ???, Tuni/E.T. showed it at the 1982
AMOA show in November

Rips Off: Donkey
Kong (big
time)

Another
candidate for Century’s most shameless rip-off. I’m not sure how this one got
by Nintendo’s lawyers (maybe it didn’t). This was basically a carbon copy of Donkey Kong with a lumberjack instead
of a carpenter, logs instead of barrels, and a giant bird instead of Donkey
Kong. Oh, and of course, substandard graphics and gameplay.

Wall St./Wall StreetTuni/?Century

Released: ??? Tuni/E.T. showed it at the 1982
AMOA show in November

Rips Off: ??? If this one ripped off something
else, I’d LOVE to know what it is. The only trampoline game I can think of off
the top of my head is Exidy’s Trapeze/Taito’s
Trampoline, but that’s nothing like
this one. The second phase was quite a
bit like Tutankham.

I may be alone here, but this one almost
makes up for all of Century’s earlier games put together. This has to be one of
the strangest classic era arcade video game concepts ever in terms of sheer
bat-poop craziness. Would-be suicide victims leapt out the windows of a
skyscraper while the player used a trampoline to bounce them into a waiting
ambulance in an attempt to keep the Dow Jones Index (represented by a bar at
the bottom of the screen) from reaching zero. All while jaunty music played in
the background. In the second stage, the player maneuvered through a bank
collecting bags of money while tanks (!?!) tried to blast him to smithereens.

RaidersCentury?/CVS?

Released: ???

Rips Off: ???

Another
vertical shooter somewhat like Astro
Blaster or Astro Fighter. The
player could move vertically as well as horizontally and had both bombs and
lasers. There was also a wave where you faced a kind of mother ship with three
ports as well as a docking stage.

Gold Bug/DiggerCentury/CVS

Released: ???, first mentioned
in RePlay in 3/83

Rips Off: ???

A rather
boring digging game with typically crude graphics. The player collected gold
nuggets while avoiding bugs. As they dug out the ground, mine carts filled with
ore.

Heart Attack/A-Maze-ZingCentury/CVS

Released: July, 1983 (RePlay catalog)

Rips Off: One hopes nothing. Though it has
some similarities to the Atari 2600 Maze
Craze cartridge.

Charts: #2 RePlay software charts, 1983

Oh man, what
a turkey. This one gets my vote for worst graphics of any game made after 1980.
Crude doesn’t even begin to describe them. As far as the actual game, the player
had 20 seconds to complete each of the 99 game’s different mazes while avoiding
pursuing “chasers” (which could be “frozen” once per level, causing the maze
walls to disappear for seven seconds). This thing actually appeared on RePlay’s software charts five times.
How? I have no idea. Even worse, Century claimed that it was “rapidly becoming
one of the top three games” in European test locations. Please tell me they
were exaggerating. Then again, maybe there’s something I’m missing.

HunchbackCentury/CVS

Released: 9/83 (MAME, Play Meter), though it was
previewed at the ATE in January, 1983 and mentioned as shipping in the 6/15/83
issue of Play Meter

Rips Off: ???

Charts: #2 RePlay software chart

This is the
big daddy as far as CVS was concerned. Their flagship game. And, surprise, surprise,
it was actually pretty darn good. The goal was to guide Quasimodo across a
series of screens to rescue the fair Esmeralda. The main character was
(reportedly) originally supposed to be Robin Hood (hence his green tunic) but
was switched to Victor Hugo’s famous bell ringer during development. To
accomplish his task, Quasimodo had to make his way across a castle wall,
leaping over pikemen, crenellations, arrows, and other obstacles or swinging
over a fiery pit to ring a bell on the other side. In a second phase the player
had to climb a pair of bell ropes and remove plugs from a series of wall
sections (shades of Donkey Kong’s rivets
level) before reaching the princess. In addition to the CVS version, Hunchback was offered as a conversion
kit for Donkey Kong (what was it
with Century and Donkey Kong?). While the gameplay is nice, it’s the main character
that really makes the game for me. Thankfully, we haven’t seen the last of him.

This might
look like a contender for Century’s biggest hit but I suspect that most of the
units sold were the DK/DK Jr. conversion kits rather than the CVS version.

While the
game was described as a racing game, it was essentially Moon Patrol with a motorcycle. Instead of Moon Patrol’s boulders, Superbike
had trees. Potholes replaced craters and the main “enemies” were balloons
(the one new wrinkle was a series of ramps that they player could use to jump
obstacles).

Hero in the Castle of Doom/Hero/Hero
in the Temple of Doom

Century/Crown Vending

Released: ca 11/84 (RePlay), shown at 1984 AMOA show

also as conversion kit for Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr.

Rips Off: Tutankham

Charts: #1 Play
Meter conversion kit chart, street locations 2/15/85

This one may
have done better than Superbike on
the charts, but I think Superbike sold
more. Again, it probably sold best as a conversion kit. It was developed by Seatongrove.

The game
featured (once again) Quasimodo’s attempts to rescue Esmeralda (or, in this
case Ezzmerelda). This one is basically a rip-off of Tutankham (though not a blatant one). Interestingly, the original
flyers for the game referred to it as Hero
in the “Temple” of Doom and featured the image of an Indiana-Jones-like
character, complete with fedora (one wonders if they changed the name and
character in an effort to avoid litigation).

Quasimodo’s
back, and with his original green tunic. The one was another shameless rip-off,
this time of Track & Field. It
featured five of the six events from the Konami/Centuri original (all except
the hammer throw) and added the discus and shot put. God help me but I like
this game. Yes the gameplay was virtually identical (and inferior) to the
original and the graphics were much worse but there’s just something about a
hunchback doing the high jump that tickles me. Another one that probably sold
better as a kit.

Pharoah (mentioned in RePlay in March, 1982 but either it was never released, or it changed
its name).

Voyager - a flyer for the game exists, though it does not include a picture of the cabinet. It is described as "the ultimate sea battle game". The player controls a Nimitz class aircraft carrier equipped with radar, sonar, bombs, torpedoes, cruise missiles, submarines, and 200 aircraft. Enemies included destroyers, subs, battleships, helicopters and aircraft. While the painting on the flyer shows a spaceship, it appears that the actual game (if it existed) was a naval combat game.The following are listed on a British flyer for Century's games, but the flyer shows only a marquee. I’ve found no other references to them.

HorizonOutlawSuper Shoot

The
following are listed at arcade-history.com but no other info is given and I’ve
found no other references to them.

[2]Ibid.
The figure may have been a misprint. Mickey Greenman later (in the May, 1984 RePlayi) claimed that there were 7,000
CVS units on location in the U.S. while Crown Vending’s Steve Hochman (in the
May 1, 1984 Play Meter) estimated
that 10,000 CVS units had been sold in the U.S. and about the same number in Europe.
If the 700 figure is accurate, it would mean that the overwhelming majority of
units were sold after Century severed their relationship with Tuni (which is
certainly possible, given the issues between the two and the fact that the
biggest hits came in 1983). It is possible that the “700” was a misprint for
“7,000” but this seems unlikely too, since it would mean that CVS sold almost
no more units after 1982. It is also possible that the 7,000 and 10,000 figures
refer to the number of game modules sold rather than base units (though this
also seems unlikely).

[3] In the Play Meter article, Reed claimed “We were supposed to get a new
game every eight to 10 weeks, but we have received a total of seven since
January.” He cannot mean that they received seven new games (since that would
have actually been more than they were promised) so I’m assuming he meant they
received seven in total, including the four that were available at the time
they signed the deal.